Why the Digital Shelf is the new battleground for brands

The ‘Digital Shelf’ refers to the online space where businesses (of all sizes) compete for product sales and visibility. It’s where an e-commerce brand’s products are displayed, discovered, and purchased by consumers.

However, unlike a physical shelf in a store, the Digital Shelf is a complex, dynamic environment comprising multiple online e-commerce touchpoints that include marketplaces, websites, search engines, and in-app stores.

Due to the highly-competitive nature of this online space, the Digital Shelf is often referred to as a ‘battleground’; where vendors must continuously work hard to gain the attention of the consumer and maintain sales. It’s not just about ‘price’; brands need to stay one step ahead of other promotional aspects too, like brand consistency and the accuracy of their product content.

This so-called ‘battleground’ environment is populated with a continuous surge of online retailers — from established brands and manufacturers to ‘disruptor’ brands and third-party sellers. And, all of these businesses are striving towards the same end goal; mastering the Digital Shelf — an important dictator of any e-commerce brand’s success.

So, to stay competitive, brands must ‘win’ the Digital Shelf — but why is it so important for your enterprise brand? How can you tell how well your business is performing on the Digital Shelf? And how can the right PIM solution help?

Read on to discover the answers to all of this, and more.

Common pitfalls enterprises face on the Digital Shelf

Before we explore what determines Digital Shelf success, let’s take a brief look at what can hold businesses back and cause a Digital Shelf disaster:

E-commerce businesses that fail to realize just how competitive the marketplace is today. It means they’re not deploying all the best tactics and strategies to operate competitively. These brands can therefore miss several crucial selling opportunities because they simply aren’t dedicating enough time to understanding:

• How marketplace algorithms work
• How to leverage automation
• The latest consumer trends and behaviors
• How to use analytics to power data-driven decisions

These challenges could stem from resourcing issues, a lack of financial investment, or both.

Teams working across multiple spreadsheets and systems, and in a siloed way are at a permanent disadvantage when trying to keep product data accurate and optimized — it’s just not a smart way to work. It’s labour-intensive and inefficient.

Brands that aren’t updating their martech stack with a PIM solution are not maximizing their levels of product visibility, product data quality, and cross-channel content consistency. They’re also making life harder for themselves when it comes to meeting channel-specific listing criteria and harnessing Digital Shelf Analytics (DSA).

Why inconsistent product content means lost sales

Inconsistent, inaccurate product content remains one of the biggest threats to an e-commerce business’s success as it can quickly lead to customers becoming frustrated, disappointed, and distrustful of your brand.

As well as the general damage caused to your brand reputation, problems like mismatched keywords and duplicate listings can seriously harm the visibility of your products in terms of their ‘discoverability’ and search rankings.

Inaccurate product content can also hurt conversion rates and cause a higher volume of customer returns, which ultimately results in higher processing costs for your business — and lost sales revenue.

A checklist for evaluating your Digital Shelf readiness

Let’s take a look at the key questions you should be asking to help assess whether your current Digital Shelf strategy is truly fit for purpose, and how a PIM solution can help solve existing issues.

Checklist point #1: The quality of your product content

Questions to ask about your business:

• Is all product content and data free of mistakes, and does it meet each specific website/marketplace’s listing guidelines?
• Are all product descriptions, titles, specifications, and media (e.g. images, etc.) presented consistently, and are they fully optimized for each sales channel?
• Are you using rich content in your product listings to help enhance your customers’ shopping experience? (i.e. interactive images, augmented reality (AR), videos, etc.)

Take action with a PIM platform: A leading PIM system can audit the product content living on a brand’s sales channels. It will quickly identify where there are gaps, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies. Then the PIM platform can be used to apply changes and updates quickly, efficiently, and in real time.

Checklist point #2: The visibility of your products

Questions to ask about your business:

• Check to see how your products are ranking — are they performing well in search results?
• Have you fully optimized your product content for SEO? Could there be missed keyword opportunities?
• Is your paid media strategy (if you have one) performing well — or is it actually underperforming?

Take action with a PIM platform: A PIM system can examine product content’s SEO keyword performance and establish whether any advertising campaigns are delivering results in comparison to the ad spend.

Checklist point #3: Your brand’s product pricing strategy

Questions to ask about your business:

• Are your products’ prices presented consistently across all sales channels?
• Is your current pricing strategy keeping your brand ahead of the competition? Are you effectively tracking what your competitors are charging in the marketplace?
• Are all the promotional opportunities open to your brand being utilized across your sales channels? Are they visible enough?

Take action with a PIM platform: A PIM solution’s DSA capability monitors pricing across all sales channels, and, in response, can implement a dynamic pricing strategy based on consumer demand, competitor offers, and more.

Checklist point #4: Customer experience and brand reputation

Questions to ask about your business:

• Do you have a robust process in place for tracking and responding to customer reviews and ratings?
• Are incoming customer returns being handled efficiently? Is the number of returns increasing over time?
• Are you maintaining high ratings for each of your brand’s products — and across multiple customer touchpoints?
• Does your fulfilment strategy leave room for improvement? (e.g. minimizing out-of-stock or overstock issues, keeping top-performing products in stock at all times.)

Take action with a PIM platform: The right PIM solution can automatically monitor customer reviews and stock availability; allowing brands to keep their Digital Shelf optimized.

Success story: Winning the Digital Shelf with inriver PIM

Marshall Group, a consumer electronics company, recognized the critical importance of getting omnichannel commerce right. It knew that it needed to deliver consistent buying experiences for its customers — no matter the sales channel.

Marshall Group also wanted to be able to reliably audit the performance of its e-commerce reseller channels so that it could concentrate more on where content is needed.

The global brand is now using inriver PIM to overcome its e-commerce challenges and effectively monitor its products’ sales performance.

With inriver PIM:

• Marshall Group can now closely monitor cross-platform stock levels — and avoid availability issues.
• They can now track sales conversions across 13 markets, and meet the customer earlier in their buying journey — through improved product visibility.
• Their product team has everything they need to easily monitor customer reviews and ratings.
• The brand team has full control over asset consistency and quality.
• The marketing team can leverage real-time data for competitor analysis.

inriver PIM has completely transformed Marshall Group’s Digital Shelf strategy.

“With one click I can have a global view of our performance. Before inriver, gathering performance data performance was manual and it could take a week or more.” — Magnus Langley, Marshall Group

How inriver empowers brands to master the Digital Shelf

Winning the Digital Shelf is critical for enterprise businesses that want to succeed in the e-commerce industry. Losing ground isn’t an option, and that’s where inriver PIM can become a critical weapon in your product marketing armory.

A streamlined, data-driven, joined-up approach to PIM is what will power your brand towards mastering the Digital Shelf and finding true commercial success — and inriver PIM is the key to making this a reality.

From managing your product content and identifying optimization opportunities to monitoring inventory and driving brand consistency at scale, inriver PIM empowers brands to take full control of their Digital Shelf.

And, with inriver’s in-built DSA solution, Evaluate, brands can manage product content compliance, gain real-time insights into performance, and leverage real-time engagement intelligence to help keep customer ratings high and return rates low.